10/13/2026
It’s so fun when programming gifts appear out of thin air. Two weeks ago I got a note from a filmmaker expressing interest in screening at Sun-Ray since she was going to be in the area. She was referred to us by a filmmaker I met many years ago and …Anyways.. It’s GOLD when this happens. Super excited that next week filmmaker Courtney Stephens will be hanging out with us for TWO nights. First? She will be Qing and Aing after a screening of a documentary she co-directed called John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office on October 21st. Interesting fella, this John Lilly, but what began as a pretty exciting and rather lofty pursuit, to communicate with the dolphin, slowly devolved into extreme drug-addled navel gazing. On October 22nd Courtney will be performing live narration to her essay film, Terra Femme: Women and the Travelogue Archives .Comprised of rare amateur travelogues shot by women between the 1920s-50s,
Vadavision’s Orla Meyer will be conducting the chats after both screenings.
John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office October 21st 7:15p.m
The daring experimenter Dr. John C. Lilly dedicated his life to radical self-investigation and unlocking the mysteries of consciousness and communication. "My body is my laboratory" was the motto, and his research on the language of dolphins and whales -- as well as psychedelics and sensory deprivation -- assured his own cult status in 20th-century pop culture as the basis for Ken Russel's Altered States and Mike Nichols's The Day of the Dolphin. Directors Michael Almareyda and Courtney Stephens, along with narrator Chloë Sevigny, explore the life of a determined scientist and his experiments into the psychonautical unknown.
Terra Femme: Women and the Travelogue Archives October 22nd 7:30pm
Terra Femme is an essay film comprised of amateur travelogues filmed by women in the 1920s-1950s. With a score by Sarah Davachi, the film weaves between geographical essay, personal inquiry, and historical speculation, examining these films as both private documents and accidental ethnographies. The films present a new type of traveler: no longer a male seeker of conquests, she might be a divorcee on a tour of biblical gardens, or a widow on a cruise to the North Pole. Representing the world through women’s eyes, the films raise questions about female representation in the archive, the role of amateurism in early non-fiction filmmaking, and the politics of the Western gaze. At once a film about longing for past worlds through cinematic excavation, this force flows in both directions: as women from the past search for self-making in the act of looking.
